i8 NATURAL SCIENCE. Jan.. 1894. 



and in an intellectual point of view, it has produced, and it is destined 

 to produce, immense changes — vast social ameliorations, and vast altera- 

 tions in the popular conception of the origin, rule, and government of 

 natural things." He therefore strove with a missionary zeal to shatter 

 this dividing wall between science and general thought ; and he did 

 it. It was perhaps his recognition of a certain analogy between this 

 bisected brain and the political brain of a later date, which often 

 appears to be divided by a double bulkhead into three separate com- 

 partments for politics, morality, and reason, that led to the vigour 

 of his anti-Gladstonian utterances. He recognised an old foe, 

 and promptly beat his pen into a tomahawk, and dashed into the fray 

 yelling the fiery warwhoops of his race. 



There was no doctrine, he thought, savoured more of the evil one 

 than this system of purchasing intellectual peace at the price of 

 intellectual death ; and throughout the whole of his career, in spite of 

 all opposition and abuse, he hurled against it his most powerful 

 ridicule and invective, and gave expression to the most passionate 

 appeals that he could utter. The world has many such refuges, he 

 said, and they will be used by all "to whom repose is sweeter than 

 the truth. But I would exhort you to refuse the offered shelter, and 

 to scorn the base repose ; to accept if the choice be forced upon 

 you, commotion before stagnation, the breezy leap of the torrent 

 before the foetid stillness of the swamp." 



Thanks to his lucidity of exposition and the fascinating charm of 

 his clear and nervous English, his efforts have exercised a deep 

 influence, and before his death he had the pleasure of seeing the 

 gospel he had preached from presidential chairs, in lectures, essays, 

 and the Press accepted by the majority of his fellow countrymen. 

 So much so has this been the case that even in reference to the 

 Belfast address itself The Times could say on his death, " we all stand 

 to-day where Tyndall stood 20 years ago." 



It was, perhaps, an even greater satisfaction to him that he 

 could watch the improvement in scientific education, for which he 

 had so long contended, and the wider interest in which he did so 

 much to foster. When we recollect how he was ever ready to leave 

 the quiet of his study to help on the spread of scientific thought 

 among his countrymen, one can but think that he had taken as his 

 life motto the words of the old Israelitish leader that we may now adopt 

 as his epitaph : — " Speak to the people, that they go forward." 



J. W. Gregory. 



